?We stand for punk as bootboy music. Oi! is working class, and if you?re not working class you?ll get a kick in the bollocks.? ? Stinky Turner, 1980.
?Loud, raw and violent, Oi-Oi is the musical battle cry of the skinheads, and like them it pulls no punches.? News Of The World, 1981.
?Oi expresses an us-against-the-world attitude, it?s the continuation of the tradition which has its roots in the Teddy Boys of the 1950s.? ? Simon Frith, sociology lecturer at Warwick University, 1981.
LET?S hear it for Oi! - the most exciting, despised and misunderstood youth movement of all time.
After 21 years we?re still winding up the mugs.
Back in 1981, Oi! managed to outrage all shades of polite middle class opinion, right, left and centre.
To this day the hippy Left perceive Oi as a kind of cultural cancer. To the establishment, Oi was an upstart from a tower block slum who wouldn?t keep in line. He was raucous and obnoxious, a human hand-grenade with a menacing disregard for authority.
At best, Oi bands and their fans were viewed as gurning barbarians gleefully pissing in the coffee house latte. At worst, they were seen as modern day brown shirts responsible for the riots in Southall, Toxteth and the rest. Either way, Oi was too hot to handle.
To the fast-talking wide-boys who adopted its name however, Oi was something else entirely. Stripped down to basics, it was about being young, working class and not taking shit from anybody. It was anti-police, anti-authority but pro-Britain too. A lot of the Oi kids liked a fight, and yeah, this is no whitewash, there was a far right element among them but this was 1980 when the far right were polling 15 ? 20 per cent of the vote in inner-city wards. It would have been a miracle if there hadn?t been NF sympathisers in the audiences. What matters is that Oi never suffered from Nazi violence the way Sham 69 and 2-Tone had. The ag that blemished those early Oi! gigs was strictly football related.
Discovered in the summer of ?81 (well into its second wind) by a mass media rocked to its foundations by weeks of riots and youthful insurrection, Oi found itself on the sharp end of the sort of tabloid crucifixion usually reserved for the more macabre mass murderers. Corrupting its meaning, the same media immediately tried to bury it. Inevitably their version of events was as watertight as a kitchen colander in a tropical monsoon. They said Oi was for skinheads (but it was always more than that), that all skins were Nazis (and only a minority ever were) and that therefore Oi was the Strasser brothers in steel-capped boots (but the bands were either socialists or cynics?)
To really understand Oi, you had to be there?.
Oi?s roots were in Punk, just as Punk?s roots were in the New York Dolls, but they weren?t the same animal. For starters Oi was the reality of Punk and Sham mythology. Punk exploded between 1976 and 1979 because stadium rock had been disappearing up its own jacksie for years. The album charts were full of po-faced synthesizer twiddlers and pretentious singers belting out meaningless pseudo-poetic lyrics.
Punk seemed different. It was raw, brutal and utterly down to earth. Punk sold itself as the voice of the tower blocks. It wasn?t. Most of the forerunners were middle-class art students. The great Joe Strummer, whose dad was a diplomat, flirted with stale old Stalinism and sang about white riots while living in a white mansion. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood tried to intellectualise punk by dressing it up in half-inched Situationist ideas, all the better to flog their over-priced produce to mug punters...
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http://www.garry-bushell.co.uk/oi/index.asp)
da alles glück und leid der wesen bedingtem wirken entspringt, wisse, dass die früchte des tuns und lassens unvermeidlich sind.
gampopa
